Police issued a warning to Edmontonians Wednesday that a sex offender they consider to be “violent and sexually violent” has been released into the public and is now living in Alberta’s capital.
They consider 38-year-old Dana Fash “to pose a risk of significant harm to the community” and said he was being closely monitored by the Edmonton Police Service’s Behavioural Assessment Unit.
Fash, who became known across Edmonton as the Mill Woods rapist, was handed a 12-year sentence in 1997 for sexually assaulting two women. One was a 44-year-old janitor he attacked with scissors in a staff washroom at Malcolm Tweddle Elementary School in Mill Woods. Another was a grandmother he attacked at knifepoint.
Both attacks took place in 1994 when he was just 16 years old.
In 2009, he was put behind bars again for breaching conditions of his conditional release that required him to abstain from drugs and alcohol.
Police said they issued the warning after weighing privacy concerns against the benefit to the public of being aware of his release.
Fash is 6’1″ and 350 pounds with brown eyes and brown hair.
Police said they are warning the public so people can take “suitable precautionary measures” but added the release of the information is not intended to encourage any type of vigilantism.